“The Time Has Come to Base Ourselves on the 30-30 (Carbine)": The Radicalization of Rural Protest in 1960s Mexico

This paper will compare the parallel development of peasant protest movements in the states of Guerrero and Chihuahua during the 1950s and 60s.  While large-scale popular mobilizations on the national level forced a number of key populist measures from President Adolfo López Mateos (1958-1964), such populism largely failed to reach and decisively impact the countryside in Guerrero and Chihuahua.  Local-regional cacique (boss) networks actively worked to prevent the implementation of reforms that challenged their political and economic interests.  I argue that the inability of the federal government to curb these local configurations of cacique power contributed to its eroding legitimacy at the local-regional levels.  Indeed, peasant organizations—after sustained instances of experiencing cacique and federal military violence while trying to exercise constitutional rights—would come to interpret such federal inability as federal unwillingness.  By the time some forms of rural protest radicalized and assumed revolutionary postures, the PRI and caciques had became one—and in need of overthrow.